Medivh spotlight.
Tomorrow maybe…? Haven’t heard anything about PTRing him.
I believe it’s supposed to be next week with the big patch.
Edit - Yes, according to this: http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/20111018/in-development-chromie-medivh-and-more-5-6-2016
PTR up now as well. Mostly just bug fixes, Medivh and ranked stuff. Pretty cool.
I’ve been trying to give ranked an honest shot in the last two weeks and I have gained about ten. I’m on the cusp of 20 for at least the second time. Honestly my first 40 or so games last fall were the biggest issue, though I still get random 50/50 with people who do not know what they are doing. It’s still an improvement though and next weeks change gives me hope.
Edit - And just hit 20. Still feels like I’m not at any point feeling like I’m being outplayed. Will keep hitting up the ranked until the change to see what happens.
Once again, my team mates in the HL matches I played yesterday were abysmal, absolutely abysmal, often leaving me speechless over their actions (or lack thereof). Even had a 3k games-played team mate as Tyrande do nothing for the team. It was her doing her thing, while the other four members were fighting as a group. Me thinks she was sabotaging the team.
I dropped from 16 to 30 with the release of Overwatch. Bad luck, bad teammates, bad drafts, shift in meta, you name it. I think the game is different, so I have to play a different role in late 20s games than I did in the teens. Specifically, no one wants to tank or heal in the late 20s and those that do self identify as damage dealers even though they are in a tank or heal class.
So, I have gotten back on a winning track by playing the tank. At least I can pick good engagements. Midgame if I see people keep face-checking plants and dying, I can gently urge that they let me start the engagements. This works 75% of the time. The other 25% they tell me I’m the worst tank in the world and I deserve to die.
Wow, they didn’t even wish that you and your loved ones die of cancer? The Blizzard community really has improved!
I’ve listed Q&As from Blizzard’s Ranked Revamp Reddit that I thought were noteworthy:
Q: Is any possible to adding the game/player rating system like OW in the future.
A: I love what Overwatch did there! I’m a big proponent of giving players ways to congratulate each other and we’re exploring ways to incorporate something similar for Heroes.
Q: Is it possible to add Overwatch’s “Avoid this player” feature to Heroes of the Storm or to add a feature that allows not to be matched together with Blocked players, in order to reduce toxicity in Ranked Play?
A: This is definitely possible! We’re hoping to add this soon. Everything has to compete in priority by what will help players the most. We’re hoping that restricting Silenced players from Ranked Play will help address this concern in the meantime.
Q: Are you working on implementing a feature that allows heroes exchange between players in the same team?
A: Swaps! Yes, we’re planning to implement swaps into the draft modes. No time frame for when it will be available currently, though.
Q: Will we further improve our stats screen, to make it as exhaustive as Overwatch’s? - Do we want to promote “great moves” like we do with the Play of the Game in Overwatch? Similarly, do we plan on putting more emphasis on kills, like in other MOBAs?
A: Play of the Game makes me so happy. One of the things I’m working on right now, actually, is developing ways to better call out players for great performance, both in a single game and over time. I’m pretty excited with what we have so far, but it’s too early to go into detail so it’ll have to remain a tease for now. This also ties into improving our stats display but I don’t have a time frame for when that might happen currently.
Q: What do you think about adding a post-match party chat, so that players can continue chatting and grow friendships with other players, as long as they remain in the Recap screen?
A: Love it! This is a little tricky to do with how the system currently functions, but I agree that it’s important and we’re looking into ways to make it easier for players to continue to communicate after the core explodes.
They’d also like to display MMRs in-game. Forgot about that one.
Just checked in to the PTR. Blown away by Medivh. Dunno know if he’s good, but he’s so interesting.
I also liked this point:
Hi, thigan!
What metric do you use to evaluate your MMR? How it is performing in the last months? How much do you plan to change it in the future?
We have a few different metrics for Matchmaking and MMR. The most important is how much fun players are having, which we use survey results to measure. Secondarily, we look at our predictions of who will win a match, and how accurately we predict different win rates. We almost always make matches where each team has a 45-55% win probability. We look at games where one team had a 55% win probability, and see if that team actually won 55% of the games. There are also metrics around how close the ratings are among all the parties in the game, wait time, and much more.
We’ve been very satisfied with most matchmaking results in the past few months. For most players, games are closer and more fun. There are still a few issues we want to address.
High level players and wide MMR spreads. One change coming with the Ranked revamp will be a very strong preference to make matches where all players are within 1 Ranked Division of each other. This should help to address the “anchoring effect” where top players will end up with a lower skill player on their team to offset their skill, in order to make a more even win probability. The changes will prefer to make an even game with all Masters and Grandmasters, but if we have to choose only one, we’ll make a slightly uneven game with Grandmasters and Masters. This whole situation was also made worse by the long term effects of the old matchmaking on our MMR distributions; we’re addressing that with the MMR normalization on season roll.
Win and Loss are currently the only inputs to the MMR system. In a 5v5 game with a lot of emphasis on team play, this may not be enough. We’d like to start looking at players’ individual performance to help place you where you belong. However, it’s very easy to create a system that players can learn and exploit; the right way to rank up and improve your MMR should always be “do the things that help your team win.” We’re going to take time with any such system to make sure it’s great before we put it live.
We’re going to keep working on matchmaking for as long as we can make meaningful improvements. We’re willing to try out any changes that will help players have more fun.
And this one:
There was a post a few months back on this subreddit about the concept of MMR hell, that I really liked. Unfortunately, I don’t have a link to it. The basic idea was that MMR Hell isn’t a static place. Instead, the feeling of MMR hell sets in when you are a little bit better than the players you get matched with, so you can see the mistakes they are making, but you aren’t good enough to carry them through their mistakes.
That’s not something a Ranking system can combat, because it’s really a question of how quickly a player’s skill improves as compared to how their rating improves.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but we do want to build a skill rating system that responds to your personal performance, as well as win and loss. I can’t share any timelines for this, but we are actively researching it.
I’m not sure what it will entail, but any sort of metric to assess individual player skill can only help ranked play make better matches.
I dunno, I think he’s understating the potential issue of exploiting individual metrics. At least in the current situation, the only job worth doing is winning. If maximizing your hero damage boosts your rank, players will start going for high scores once the match slows the slightest hint of going south. Even if they just think stats influence rank, it will affect their play. It’s already bad enough that players will ignore their faults if they have high siege damage.
That’s probably why it’s taken them so long to implement from what I gathered. They don’t want something that can be gamed basically. Hell I’d be fine not even knowing what the metrics are, as long as I can see the results. Maybe once they get to the stats overhaul they’ll be closer to tweaking things more. In any case, hopefully the new system will just do an overall better job regardless. I know I’m not nearly the only person who had a meh placement and then a big string of shit matches that made me quit hl for ages. It’s just now evened out, but only because I was tempted by the preseason mount or I’d never have bothered.
Here’s a somewhat relevant interesting graph of my hl experience: http://imgur.com/3qAPr1j You can see my placement match dive, then the spike up as I was placed at 22 followed by the descent to wtfville. The recent spike up when I decided to bother trying again was after the prior 40+ games played.
Also really liking Medivh. He’s so weird, but so interesting. Lots of cool things going on next week heh.
That theory about “MMR Hell” is spot on, I think.
Dying should subtract from how many points you gain or lose after a match. If you win and die fewer than 3 times, you should get a bonus. If you win but fed and died 8 times you get less than the 100 points.
Given that death timers are also a factor, maybe there is a weighting. A death at lvl 20 is different than one at lvl 1.
Not dying is such a fundamental component of the game.
I ran into the most frustrating comp in the universe last night on BoE. KT banned, they picked Li-ming and Artanis , we get Falstad and Sonya they end up with Gazlowe and Chromie with an Uther.
Basically I had zero way to get past their Uther and Artanis once the slow turrets came out and we’re all just sitting ducks for the Chromie to chunk from a mile away. If it was next week I’d have asked for a Medivh, but it’s not. Pretty sure that the only way we’d have reached the damn back line would be with portals.
Not sure if our Falstad was just a douchebag or frustrated, but always going on about not focusing Artanis. It’s like, yeah I know exactly how his trait works but if I walk past him I die before I reach anyone and nobody is with me duh. Just classic example of a statement that isn’t crazy on its own, but in context is a total joke.
For once I wouldn’t have minded a half decent Nova on our team lol.
On the fun side, after that I queued with my daughter on Brightwing and me on Tassadar and we had an amusing quick match handing out shields like candy. Also amusing having peekaboo and Tassadar trait vs Zeratul and Nova.
I’d be fine with ‘time spent waiting to respawn’ being a factor
But what about leoric and murky? Cloud9 final against Team Dignitas where they chose leo AND murky is one of the all time great matches. Leo was constantly dying. Victory is a perfect metric. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t include individual stats, but I would claim that the only ‘simple’ stat is victory. Any other metric will negatively impact team-play unless Blizzard comes up with a very clever and/or opaque formula.
That’s a pretty weird specific outlier though that would normally never matter. It really only worked because of the map and very specific comp. I’m not even sure if it would still work since Leoric sucks much more now.
Also, in cases like Murky, TLV and so forth I’d expect to have to implement specific rules for any system attempting to measure performance just because of their (and other heroes) unique mechanics. Which is another reason it’s not a simple problem to tackle, but I hope they do come up with something.
They just need some way of telling people “Dying is really bad and only gets worse the later in game you get.”